Can we verify the existence of a human mortality plateau today or in the near future?

Laszlo Nemeth, Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Maciej Danko, Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Trifon I. Missov, Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The article studies three mixture (frailty) models that incorporate a Gompertz or Gompertz-Makeham baseline mortality: the proportional hazards (PH), the accelerated failure time (AFT), and the digamma-Gompertz model (DGG). Mortality plateaus are generated within the PH framework, while the force of mortality in the AFT and DGG settings has an inverse-bathtub shape. The article aims to answer if it is possible to verify the existence of a mortality plateau, i.e. if the goodness-of-fit of the PH model is better than the one of AFT and DGG, given current mortality data.